Arles is a perfect French town: architecturally beautiful, rich in history, full of great restaurants, lively beyond the tourist trade, and offering a brilliant privately owned and run hotel from which to base yourself: L’Hôtel Nord Pinus. Even the name tells you to expect something different. The poster in the Napoleon room tells me not […]

Paris goes quiet in August; the rest of France is a blur of activity. Nowhere does summer holidays like France, and nothing says summer holidays like a good old-fashioned fête de village. Living in the French countryside can get a bit quiet in the winter months, but that is more than made up for by […]

Paris hotels range from stately palaces like giant wedding cakes, to space-station-esque design disasters, to dives and dumps and dungeons. Quietly minding her business, tucked away on the Place des Vosges, is the true queen of the castle, the Pavillon de la Reine. We love the Pavillon de la Reine. You couldn’t claim it had […]

‘Marché’ means ‘market’. ‘Gras’ means ‘fat’. Welcome to the awesome ‘Marché au Gras’—the Ugolino’s Tower of every vegetarian’s worst nightmare, but the Bower of Bliss on my quest to understand authentic French country cooking. The Marché au Gras is where those of us who aren’t the wives of traditional peasant farmers buy our fattened geese […]

It’s a commonplace that Paris is a great city of culture. But if you don’t speak French, and you’re bored of staring at paintings, traipsing around the shops and learning about the revolution, what exactly do you do? Actually I can think of many things, but few are as fun as a last-minute ticket to […]